Coyote Blog

Even in all-electric mode, the Fisker Karma gets worse mileage than an SUV  (only a deeply flawed EPA MPGe rating, purposely designed to over-state electric car efficiency, hides this fact).

John Stossel has a great link-filled round up of failed and failing solar and green energy programs funded by the Obama Administration with our money.  Check out the extensive list.

Here, for laughs, is Ray Lane of Kleiner Perkins rhapsodizing about Obama as the greatest government venture capitalist ever, and using for his prime example ... Solyndra!

I suppose at one point Kleiner Perkins used to take private risks with private money, but it seems to have found out it can make higher returns leveraging its investments with taxpayer money, and then using political influence to mandate business for the companies in which it invests. Thus the hiring of Al Gore, among other moves, to the KP board. Lane, by the way, is Chairman of serial government trough-feeder Fisker automotive, which make admittedly very cool-looking cars that require a lot of taxpayer subsidies.

Certainly Mr. Lane knows something about marketing, including that age-old tactic the "bait and switch."  The taxpayer subsidies of Fisker were made on the theory that electric cars were somehow greener than gasoline cars because they use less energy.  But looking at the fuel at the power plant it takes to make the electricity that goes into a Fisker Karma, the car gets worse gas mileage than an SUV  (only an EPA equivalent MPG standard that breaks the second law of thermodynamics hides this fact).  Congratulations Mr. Lane, green subsidies for sub-SUV gas mileage.  All those checks KP partners wrote to Obama in the last election certainly got a good return.

I am glad to see that other sites with more influence than I are focusing attention on the electric vehicle mileage fraud.   The Green Explored site writes, via Q&O:

The EPA allows plug in vehicle makers to claim an equivalent miles per gallon (MPG) based on the electricity powering the cars motors being 100% efficient. This implies the electric power is generated at the power station with 100% efficiency, is transmitted and distributed through thousands of miles of lines without any loss, is converted from AC to DC without any loss, and the charge discharge efficiency of the batteries on the vehicle is also 100%. Of course the second law of thermodynamics tells us all of these claims are poppycock and that losses of real energy will occur in each step of the supply chain of getting power to the wheels of a vehicle powered with an electric motor.

Finally!  For months I have been writing about this and have started to believe I was crazy.   I have written two Forbes pieces on it (here and here) and numerous blog posts, but have failed to get much traction on it, despite what appears to be near-fraudulent science.  I wrote

the government wants an equivilent MPG standard for electric cars that goes back to the power plant to estimate that amount of fossil fuels must be burned to create the electricity that fills the batteries of an electric car.  The EPA’s methodology is flawed because it assumes perfect conversion of the potential energy in fossil fuels to electricity, an assumption that violates the second law of thermodynamics.   The Department of Energy has a better methodology that computes electric vehicle equivalent mileage based on real world power plant efficiencies and fuel mixes, while also taking into account energy used for refining gasoline for traditional cars.  Using this better DOE methodology, we get MPGe’s for electric cars that are barely 1/3 of the EPA figures.

The linked articles provide much more detail on the calculations.  As a result, when the correct methodology is applied, even in all-electric mode the heavily subsidized Fisker Karma gets just 19 MPG-equivalent.

Do you want to know the biggest energy advantage of electric cars?  When you fill them with energy, you don't stand there at the pump watching the cost-meter spin, as you do in a gas station.   It's not that the energy cost is lower, it's just better hidden (which is why I suggested the Fisker Karma be renamed the Fisker Bastiat, after the French economist who wrote so eloquently about the seen and unseen in economic analysis).  It's why, to my knowledge, no electric car maker has ever put any sort of meter on its charging cables.

I have written several articles (here and here) outlining why the EPA's method of giving electric cars an equivalent or eMPG is outright fraudulent.  I calculated for the average driver, for example, that the Nissan Leaf's 99 eMPG was actually closer to 36.  Why?  Well, in the EPA's methodology, the science-based Obama administration pretends the 2nd law of thermodynamics does not exist.  Specifically, they assume perfect conversion of the chemical potential energy in fossil fuels to electricity.  They also assume zero transmission losses.  To rework the calculation, I actually used a Clinton-era Department of Energy methodology called well to wheels.

So here is something I thought I would never write:  It turns out the Union of Concerned Scientists agrees with me.  Apparently they have used a similar methodology to rework electric vehicle MPGs based on the fuel mix of the power in different cities, rather than an average national fuel mix as I did it.  I am not sure how they did the analysis - did they use average fuel mix or the marginal fuel, and if the marginal fuel did they assume the marginal fuel at night or during the day?   For example, certain California cities look good with solar use but that does not do anything for typical night time car charging.

Anyway, the problem is hard and I could quibble with how they did it.  But the results are telling - everywhere they looked, even in the hydro-powered Pacific Northwest, the eMPG they got was lower than that of the EPA's.  And in many cases much lower.

If corporations were using the EPA's eMPG methodology, they would be busted by the FTC for false advertising.  It's time to fix this calculation so Fisker Karma drivers can't continue to fool themselves into thinking they are doing something positive for the environment.

Apparently electric vehicle maker -- and recipient of lots of your and my money -- Fisker Automotive is struggling.    Who would have thought that a company that could not fully fund itself privately and had to rely on political connections to use the coercive power of government to take money from taxpayers might be a bad investment?

As a reminder, Fisker's taxpayer largesse likely came at the behest of politically powerful Ray Lane of Kleiner Perkins.  It is his firm's investment returns we taxpayers are supporting.  So it should come as no surprise that Ray Lane says, in the video below, that he thinks Obama is the greatest public sector venture capitalist ever.  What does he use as justification for this conclusion?  Why, Solyndra!  I kid you not, check it out.

By the way, if you did not see it, check out my Forbes article on how the Fisker Karma gets worse mileage than an SUV when you trace its electricity back to the power plant.

I started blogging because I was always frustrated in live arguments that I would remember the killer comment 5 minutes too late, so it is no surprise that I find live TV frustrating.  Here is how I had hoped the interview would go this morning on Fox.  In actual execution, I decided not to play the "2nd law of thermodynamics" card on the morning show just after the in-studio visit by a bunch of bijon frise's.

I'm confused, why are we we even talking about miles per gallon in an electric car?

• We measure how well traditional cars use fossil fuels with the miles they drive per gallon of gas, or mpg
• Of course, we can't measure efficiency the same way in an electric car since they don't use gas directly, though the electricity we use to charge them is mostly produced from fossil fuels.
• So the EPA came up with a methodology to show an equivalent MPG for electric cars so their fossil fuel use (way back in the power plant) could be compared to traditional cars

And you think there is a problem with those numbers?

• It turns out the EPA uses a flawed methodology that overstates the electric car equivalent MPG, in part because they assume the potential energy in fossil fuels can be converted to electricity in the power plant with perfect efficiency, which doesn't happen in real life and actually violate the second law of thermodynamics

How should they have done it?

• During the Clinton administration, the Department of Energy came up with a better methodology which uses real world power plant efficiencies and fuel mixes to determine how much fuel went into charging an electric car.

• Using this methodology, the Fisker Karma, even in all-electric mode, gets about 19 mpg equivilent, not 52.  This means that it uses about the same amount of fossil fuels to drive a mile as does a Ford Explorer SUV -- the only difference is that the fossil fuel use is better hidden.

I will be on the Fox and Friends morning show tomorrow morning at about 8:50ET  (though of course these things are always subject to change right up to the last minute).  I will be talking Fisker Karma.

This will make the third time I have been on national TV -- one talking about park management, one talking about the minimum wage and this one talking about MPG calculations for electric cars.  At least I am not in a rut, though I think my pundit brand identification is probably confusing.

Ray Lane of VC Kleiner Perkins is seen in this video trumpeting how the Obama Administration is, for the first time in his memory, succesfully making investments in private companies.  His main example:  Solyndra!

The reason this is particularly timely and fascinating is that just a few weeks ago, Ray Lane took delivery of the first Fisker Karma electric car, financed with $529 million of our tax money and promoted with $7500 of our tax money on every sale,  Mr. Lane and Kleiner are investors in Fisker (and Lane is Fisker's Chairman) and therefore huge beneficiaries of Obama's largess, and Mr. Lane got the first Karma as a big thank you for his political connections that helped score the cash.

Of course Kleiner (who also hired green Crony-in-chief Al Gore) is going to be thrilled with the government money. Nothing is worse than being a VC in with a large early round position in a company and being unable to get the next stage of investment. Since it appears they could not get any private investors to fund this, the taxpayer money probably saved their investment .... at least for a while.

Update: Ray Lane is apparently ticked off by the negative publicity surrounding the Fisker Karma and the money they received from taxpayers. Tough. Surely he is used to his investors being ticked off about bad outcomes. Well, now he gets to see how REALLY ticked off his investors can be when their money was taken against their will, even without their knowledge. At least he can tell his institutional guys, when things go bad, that they came in with eyes open. What's his response to taxpayers?

For those who have not seen it, my article on how the Fisker Karma, even on all electric, uses more fossil fuels per mile than an SUV is here.

I had some fun yesterday, dashing off a quick note about the Fisker Karma electric car and just how bad the electric mileage is if you use the DOE methodology rather than the flawed EPA methodology to calculate an mpg-equivalent.

It was the quickest and shortest column I have ever written on Forbes, so of course it has turned out to be the most read.  It has been sitting on top of the Forbes popularity list since about an hour after I wrote it, and currently has 82,000 reads (I am not a Twitter guy but 26,000 tweets seems good).

I wanted to add this clarification to the article:

Most other publications have focused on the 20 mpg the EPA gives the Karma on its backup gasoline engine (example), but my focus is on just how bad the car is even in all electric mode.    The calculation in the above article only applies to the car running on electric, and the reduction in MPGe I discuss is from applying the more comprehensive DOE methodology for getting an MPG equivilent, not from some sort of averaging with gasoline mode.  Again, see this article if you don’t understand the issue with the EPA methodology.

Press responses from Fisker Automotive highlight the problem here:  electric vehicle makers want to pretend that the electricity to charge the car comes from magic sparkle ponies sprinkling pixie dust rather than burning fossil fuels.  Take this quote, for example:

a Karma driver with a 40-mile commute who starts each day with a full battery charge will only need to visit the gas station about every 1,000 miles and would use just 9 gallons of gasoline per month.

This is true as far as it goes, but glosses over the fact that someone is still pouring fossil fuels into a tank somewhere to make that electricity.  This seems more a car to hide the fact that fossil fuels are being burned than one designed to actually reduce fossil fuel use.  Given the marketing pitch here that relies on the unseen vs. the seen, maybe we should rename it the Fisker Bastiat.

The Fisker Karma electric car, developed mainly with your tax money, has rolled out with an EPA MPGe of 52.   But this number is bogus.  The true MPGe is worse than a Ford Explorer.  Learn why in my Forbes.com piece.